How many schools in this nation require a parent to sign a form stating that if the credits or diploma earned by their child in that school are not acceptable outside their school they will not hold the school responsible? When choosing a school for your child, troubled or not, wouldn’t a good education be a fundamental element in this package? Especially when considering that the cost of tuition per year for a student at this school would easily pay for two years at a local community college or one year of tuition at a State University and would include the cost of living on campus.

Would it not make sense that if the credits earned in a school were not worth the paper they were printed on that a portion of the tuition be refunded to the family to be able to seek a decent education for their child in another facility?

School of Tomorrow was basically created to give home-schooling parents an "organization" or "school" to join to get around the red-tape a lot of states make you go through for home schooling your kids. It is NOT accredited in MOST states.
 
I was lucky, I went to a small local college after MP, and my credits transferred. They looked over my records very closely before allowing me in, and I had to have a few meetings with the Dean himself before they took them, but he accepted my credits in the end. I was not about to take 4 years' worth of HS credits over again, nor was I going to get a GED after I had worked for my diploma.

The point is: how can an institution call itself a school if it can’t guarantee an education for its students?

Mountain Park offers foreign language video classes. These classes were a part of the A Beka Book video curriculum, sent from Pensacola Christian High School. Actual teachers taught these videos, and the classes had actual students for example. When I was a student, I was the first student other than Rachel Gerhardt (daughter of Sam & Debby Gerhardt) allowed to take French. They had been offering Spanish for sometime already.

Now, after saying that-- the two foreign languages taught there were NOT allowed to be spoken in the dorms. Their reasoning: the staff would not know what the students were saying if they over-heard them speaking a foreign language. They believed that if two students were speaking and didn't want anyone to know what they were saying they must have something to hide. Sign language was not allowed either. No gestures of any kind other than your typical motioning a person to come over to do something.

If you will look in the Mountain Park Parent Handbook, it tells the definition of a "single-girl" (non orientation guide who is no longer considered a new student) and an orientation guide. Then, if you look on page 78, under the "Safety Measures" taken by Mountain Park to ensure that all students are safe and accounted for, it says in #57- "There is an orientation guide present when two or more single girls are talking." Mountain Park is obviously concerned about monitoring conversations to prevent independent thought.

The use of a foreign language is the only guaranteed way to master it. My husband studied German for 4 years in High School, but when he got to Germany, he had to speak it for 6 weeks before he was finally really getting the hang of it. Then, 3 years later, we moved to Germany, and he was deployed for 7 months. When he came back to Germany, I was getting around on my own in the German community, and was learning on my own more than he could remember from High School. I had never taken a single German class. This is what using a foreign language can do.

If Mountain Park is willing to give video classes to learn a language, but are not willing to allow the students to practice the language together to get their pronunciation or grammar skills perfected, how can they expect them to use it properly? They cannot ask questions of the teachers. The staff members who sit in on the video classes are simply there to observe that the students don't goof off, they don't know any more about those classes than they do about nuclear science. And, Mountain Park only offers one year of Spanish, and one year of French. Do you honestly think it is possible to master a foreign language through one year of VIDEO CLASSES?????

Quick tip: Most colleges who require a foreign language for admission require 2 credits in that language.

As for the other classes- yes, they offer a video class for physical science and chemistry, they offer paces for biology and other sciences, but NO, they DO NOT offer any labs of any kind. How could you possibly get lab credit or any decent type of science experience without a lab to supplement your knowledge. I was in NO WAY prepared to take a lab science when I entered college.

There were also annual Physical Science projects. Half of the boys always did a volcano out of vinegar and baking soda, most of the kids did soil, or something they could find the pieces for outside. We had no real supplies for our projects. You can learn by reading in books, but you can't supplement it without the proper materials. Mountain Park just doesn't provide those. But WOE unto those who didn't have their projects done. They failed the course.

School of Tomorrow and A Beka Book classes are meant to be supplemented, and yet Mountain Park is considered a "model school" for School of Tomorrow. I honestly don't see how they can call an incomplete school a model for others.